Evaluation of synchronization methods by means of software defined radio architectures

The standards for wireless sensor communications usually do not pose severe constrains on time synchronization methods. In fact, when used for communication purposes, an overall time synchronization accuracy on the order of tens of microseconds is well enough. For this reason, timestamping mechanisms (the basic feature exploited by all algorithms) are often not specified. Real world transceivers, even if compliant with the same standard, use different (and unknown) implementations. Consequently, it is hard to verify simulation results since performance greatly depends on the adopted hardware. A flexible solution as the Software Defined Radio (SDR) could overcome such limitations, being hardware (and manufacturer) independent. In this paper, the idea of using an SDR for the simulation and the experimental evaluation of synchronization strategies is investigated. Moreover, some experimental results are analyzed in a real case concerning IEEE802.15.4 over a low-cost and open source SDR platform (USRP with GNU Radio).